


Brightest Witch of Her Age

by zorilleerrant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Accepting Wizarding Society, Gen, Trans Hermione Granger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 05:54:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14158224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorilleerrant/pseuds/zorilleerrant
Summary: Being trans doesn't work exactly the same way in the wizarding world. It doesn't really work the same at all.





	Brightest Witch of Her Age

When Hermione gets her letter, she assumes everything will be the same. The same watching her words and her gestures, the same hiding. She assumes people will _know_ or at least they’ll _find out_ , and then it’ll be back to no one talking to her and the teachers making scrunched up faces at her neat pleated skirts and floral tops. Back to snickering behind her back and taunts to her face, back to being pushed off the slide and having her homework stolen, back to being sent to the counselor every single day because why won’t she just get along with the other kids?

The same, but with _magic_.

Here’s the thing about magic: when there’s a magical solution to everything, people rely on it too much. There are a slew of problems that ‘can’t be solved’ that can be at least strongly modified with the application of a little logistical reasoning. There are ‘dire consequences’ that can be mitigated with simple planning – checklists are the easiest. And there are even more things that can be done cheaper and faster and more safely and more effectively and in so many different ways, but the solution’s been long forgotten amongst the rest of the mundane.

Here’s the thing about magic: when there’s a charm or a potion or at worst a ritual for everything, nothing is ‘too permanent’ a step to take, too big a decision for a child. When anything can be reversed at any stage, what’s the point in putting regulations on anything? When it’s long been more efficient for alliances between the houses not to pay any heed to such a changeable matter as reproduction, when marriages have been between anyone, when creating an embryo can be done with seven people or only one, whence this notion of _assigning_ children into one thing or another? When your transfiguration teacher can, with a thought, turn herself bodily into a _cat_ , there tends to be little in the way of biologized notions of gender.

So Hermione learns this: there’s a potion that changes the body from male to female (or female to male, if one were so inclined). It lasts for twenty-four hours, and works immediately on taking it. There are only three recorded interactions, all with very rare potions that are no longer industry standard. Side effects may include runny nose, coughing, and dry mouth. It can be had at a sickle for ten doses from any joke shop, and half that at an apothecary.

It can be had for free from Madam Pomfrey, although she begins to get suspicious after more than a few doses in a row.

Hermione learns all this from books, from pamphlets, from gossip among the students. She also hears there’s someone in her year who has a regular supply, enough for nearly every day, through the school. She doesn’t hear who or why. She isn’t sure she believes it. She has a hard enough time figuring what the potions books mean about the Sefen Common Variantes and how to make them, when they won’t tell her exactly what they do, and while she can find them easily enough in the Hogsmeade apothecary, she’s afraid to try them, because, well, _nothing will list what they do_. (To be fair, it listed only in the vaguest terms what the one she tried would do, and she had to try both of the most common ones before she figured out which was which.)

And Hermione learns this: there are regimens of spells that change a specific body part, any one you could wish. There are ones that last for days, for weeks, there are even ones that last for years. She learns there are specialists licensed in the application of such spells, that this is the wizarding answer to cosmetic surgery.

She learns that someone on staff at any funded school almost always knows some of these, because sometimes appearance is more than just cosmetic. She learns that the easiest things to change are the color of skin, hair, and eyes, and that at least half of second year students, and most by third, will know at least a handful of these. Most commonly they’re used to create a subtle glow effect, and then sometimes to turn someone pink, blue, neon green. Using them on someone else as a prank is considered extremely gauche. There’s also one for getting rid of acne that almost everyone treats as routine.

Hermione learns most of this from follow-up questions to teachers and confidential conversations with Madam Pomfrey, who knows many of the spells herself, though only the shorter term ones. She learns that Madam Pomfrey can’t disclose that information about other students, but it’s been many years since she was asked for such a thing, anyway, anything beyond mitigating certain bodily odors or reducing the appearance of scars. She walks away knowing how to turn her hair any color of the rainbow, how to counteract oily skin, and how to put off libido until later should it prove inconvenient at the time. (That one she shows immediately to everyone in her dorm, and Ginny, who knew it but was too embarrassed to say, and Ron and Harry, who had both tried very hard to forget that Molly showed them.) (They’re grateful, mostly, though one of the older girls has no idea what use someone would have for that, and Hermione could swear she heard about something like that, but she’s busy right now.)

Then Hermione learns this: there’s a sequence of potions (five altogether, though each has to be taken several times anyway) taken either once or twice a month, that there can be negative side effects, but these will usually be cleared up with standard potions for the constitution, that they work, that they work quickly. That they’re permanent. She learns this is what’s _usually done_ for students in her position.

She learns that the infirmary keeps a supply standard, because there’s always one or two.

And Hermione takes this information and files it away, because she has no idea what she wants to do with it yet.

Of course, her parents would understand. Be relieved, probably, because they’re medical professionals themselves, and they can tell you all the complications. (They wouldn’t tell Hermione, because she’s too young yet, too easy to scare, but Hermione has always been good at getting her hands on books. She’s fourteen, it’s not like she hasn’t had those conversations with anyone else. She goes to support groups. Well, muggle ones.) They’ve always been supportive, although if her books aren’t lying (and Hermione isn’t old enough yet to truly _believe_ that books can lie, no matter how long she’s _known_ ) then that’s the standard here in the Wizarding world. Not even. It’s sort of just what’s _done_. It’s not even considered a treatment, not really.

She’s nervous, at first, because asking for something like that will be admitting something she doesn’t want anyone to know, and she wonders if they’ll make the stairs keep her out or switch her to one of the third set of rooms that barely anyone sleeps in once they find out. She sees a few of the older students walk up those stairs, every now and then; she doesn’t know why and she’s too afraid to see what’s at the top of the stairs herself.

She wishes she knew someone else in her situation. She thought, for a while, that Neville might be going through the same thing, or something like it, and she’d thought, how callous, how cruel, that the teacher almost always said ‘he’ and ‘she’ only now and then, how they usually said ‘Mr. Longbottom’ and only rarely ‘Ms.’ How they made Neville sleep in the boy’s dormitory. (Hermione offered her one of the potions it had taken so much time to get, so much effort to hoard, but Neville didn’t want one, said she’d tried them and they were more annoying than anything else.) Then, one day, everyone had called Neville ‘they’.

Hermione asked them about it, during herbology.

“Oh, I guess I’m just having a ‘they’ day today,” Neville said.

“What, just today?” Hermione asked.

“Probably,” Neville agreed, “I’ll most likely be back to ‘he’ again tomorrow. You can just use ‘he’ now, if it’s difficult for you. My gran’s French; she has that problem.”

No, Hermione said, she could use ‘they’ for them, and she did.

And that evening, she asked one of the older students about the third set of stairs.

“Well, they can’t very well have separate dorms for every single person, can they?” the student had said. “There’s a ‘boys’ catchall and a ‘girls’ catchall, and everything else.”

And Hermione learns this: that the wizarding world has three terms for gender, which are ‘witch’, ‘wizard’, and ‘metamorph’, and that metamorphmagi were raised in that third category, and that as other sorts of things came to light, they were dropped in that category, too. That as metamorphmagi died out (or stopped being born, _that_ the texts are unclear on) people applied it primarily to other genders, rarer ones, and ones from other cultures. That most people in the wizarding world don’t declare their genders until their first day at Hogwarts, that that’s what the uniforms are for. (That’s why there was that third kind. She doesn’t want to wear it anymore.)

This is the first time Hermione learns words for people who are mostly boys or kind of girls or partly something else. It’s the first time someone explains what Neville said about being usually a boy, and for the first time in her life, Hermione feels like her gender is _less_ confusing than everybody else’s. After all, she’s a girl all the time. And probably entirely, as well, though she doesn’t exactly know how something like that gets counted, or how you tell. (She heard of some people who were neither nor, in her support groups, but she never met them, and she assumed it was rather rude to go about asking people to explain just to satisfy her curiosity.) (So she knows muggles have some sort of thing, too, and if only muggle studies actually had any information.) She’s sure of at least one thing, though. And she decides to go ahead.

She still wishes she knew someone to ask about it. There’s no support group here, no mentoring program, no guidebook or anything, because if you ask a wizard, there’s no reason for there to be. It’s like having glasses, or asthma, or an allergy. You just take your potions, and then everything is solved. Why would you need to know, unless you want to be a Healer? Hermione never thought acceptance would feel so lonely.

Oh, there’s still sexism here, classism, racism, xenophobia. There’s some strange thing with blood purity and ancient politics Hermione still doesn’t understand. But if she had to choose worlds, even without the magic, if she had to choose – by god she’ll choose the one where some people think she’s a mudblood, but no one questions that she’s a girl.


End file.
